Disappointment

Thought I would start a thread with a photo that obviously needs some P+P work, in competent hands, and learn of you guys on the way.

Kit lens at 18mm
ISO 800: 1/60 @ f11
Straightened/Cropped, added a fair amount of fill light in an attempt to avoid loss of detail - raising the exposure/brightness just killed what little detail in the grey sky there is.

Subject and Composition on this one am relaxed with - though feel free to C+C as all help is welcome.
At a loss though as to where to start with actually bringing this one to something of a worthwhile record.

So a free for all, whether by actual edits/adjustments or by advice and suggestions.
Will try to carry out your leads - it will be good to see what can be salvaged.

It's fairly hard to adjust an image that is so small but from the original I'd suggest you adjust everything but the sky with levels and add a little contrast. Possibly a little saturation. From what you posted the camera did a pretty good job of capturing the foreground and not blowing out the brighter sky.

I'm already overdue for bed or I'd have a go at it this evening. I'll leave you with a suggestion, though.

Duplicate your base layer, create a new layer and bucket fill it with orange. Merge that down in Overlay mode. Create a layer mask blacking out everything but the sky, then merge it down in Divide mode at somewhere between 50% and 70%. That will put some blue in your sky. Fiddling with the percentages lets you decide how much.

From what you posted the camera did a pretty good job of capturing the foreground and not blowing out the brighter sky.

Trying to get the knack of exposure. In this instance took a reading (with the K100D) of the sky, then of the subject, finally making a compromise between the two. Clearly, whilst not blowing the sky, I blew something.

Have adjusted the levels in all but the sky (by selecting it and then inverting)

a) First making a levels (RGB) adjustment by clipping.
b) Then going to levels again, and selecting the enhance per channel contrast - which i think introduced some saturation

Very pleased with your enhancement.
Sorry for keeping the image down to 640pix, but I don't want to clog things up as I post my efforts to follow advice.

Duplicate your base layer, create a new layer and bucket fill it with orange. Merge that down in Overlay mode. Create a layer mask blacking out everything but the sky, then merge it down in Divide mode at somewhere between 50% and 70%. That will put some blue in your sky. Fiddling with the percentages lets you decide how much.

Well, never found divide but stubborness pushed along.
Wanting to follow your advice, from the second image again began by selecting the sky -this time expanding by a pixel. Then copied and pasted into a new layer - which created an accompanying mask. Instead of orange, selected a skyish pale blue (as best as this red-green deficient sight saw), and used the bucket tool to fill the new layer. Set the blend mode to Overlay, left Opacity at 100% but moved Fill to 68%.

The result, to me, looks like a reasonable introduction of sky blue to accompany the previous adjustment without contradicting the level of highlights and shadows.

Overall, the picture is definately improving - but am sure you guys can do a better job than my attempts to follow your advice. My thanks to both Peter and Mike, the outcome has been very encouraging.
C+C+Advice can continue - if you know ways to improve, then please direct.

Thanks Donald, Giving the colour and layer blending has really heped reduce the trial, error and guesswork out of finding a starting point for sky repair. Looks like I need to do some work on my concept of light balance too

Well no one yet has attempted to do it this way but heres a take on it...

When adding skies though you have to take into account the perspective but more importantly (IMHO) is the lighting of the sky compared to the lighting of the picture. In this case they dont really match perfectly but good enough. But this was done in CS3 in 5 mins with a very small jpeg so its rough around the corners (bad jpeg compression even though it was "12"... because it looks much cleaner on in PS) and I was too lazy to find a better suiting sky..

Thanks

EDIT: I totally forgot to adjust the rest of the picture (slight underexposure) but I think you can do that quite easily with curves (or levels).

Rome is a nice city indeed! lots of interesting things to photograph. i have a very similar picture of the same statue in a folder i was just looking at today. it was a sunnier day though as the sky is a nice blue colour! something like Mikhails image!